Boundary stones and outside roads: where the Settlement ended, and where it didn't, 1893–1940

The short answer. The International Settlement had a legal edge, marked from 1893 by stone posts with inscriptions on them, and a practical edge, which was wherever the Council’s roads, water pipes and police reached. The two never coincided. By 1925 the Council taxed some 4,000 houses beyond its line, had graded fifteen miles of new road across other people’s land, and collected 200,000 taels a year from districts it did not govern. The Chinese authorities answered with protests, then with a road of their own to hem the Settlement in, and finally, in 1940, with a police force for the western roads agreed with a government the Council did not recognise. The stones, meanwhile, were built over.

1893: forty stones in Hongkou

For thirty years after the American settlement joined the British one, nobody could say where Hongkou ended. The line Consul Seward had proposed in 1863 was never surveyed, and the Council collected rates and posted police where it could. In February 1893 the daotai appointed a committee of three, the Shanghai county magistrate, the Mixed Court magistrate and a sub-prefect, to settle the matter with a consular delegate, the American vice consul-general W. S. Emens, and the Council’s two engineers. The Chinese side agreed a line in March, the viceroy at Nanjing approved it, and on 10 and 11 June 1893, “in the presence of the Shanghai Magistrate, the Mixed Court Magistrate, the Local Committee, the Municipal Engineers, and myself”, as Emens reported, forty boundary stones were set along it. They carried inscriptions in both languages; Emens had one photographed and sent the prints to the daotai; eight regulations agreed for the boundary were printed on the plans in Chinese and English. The daotai ratified the whole on 22 July 1893. The Council’s accounts put the survey, the stones and the photographs at 7,024.60 taels, of which the stones themselves cost 112.48.

The police welcomed it as “a long-felt want”. The settled line brought “from 25,000 to 30,000 people” under the Municipality; before it, the commissioner wrote, it had been impossible to tell where the Council’s jurisdiction ended and the gambling houses of Li Hongkew, just across whatever the line was, had flourished on the uncertainty. Now they were “completely driven out of the Settlement”. The new ground between Henan Road and the creek, “from a stone opposite the Gas Works, to the Rifle Butts”, was named West Hongkew and given a police district. The Council added a sentence to its report that explains the next forty years: “The boundary lines are periodically inspected and the interests of the Municipality are being carefully watched.”

1899: a line across open country

The extension of 1899 tripled the Settlement and multiplied its edge. The new boundary was surveyed by the Council’s Public Works Department with the Shanghai magistrate and the viceroy’s two deputies, the American adviser John C. Ferguson and the official Yu Lianyuan, who had been told to include no land from Baoshan county. The ratepayers adopted the line unanimously on 29 June 1899 and the ministers sanctioned it in July. Pott’s table shows what the Council had taken on: a land boundary of 11.18 miles where there had been 6.43. Much of it ran across fields. To the north it followed the county boundary and the creek beside it, which the Council soon filled to make Boundary Road; to the west it ran from the Temple of Agriculture behind Bubbling Well village north to the Xiaoshadu ferry. Lord Salisbury’s instruction to the British minister, printed by Pott, was to “take care that nothing is said which would in any way pledge us to refrain from making further demands”. The report for 1899 is not on the Internet Archive, but the stones it set turn up nine years later, when the Council was accused of burying them. In July 1908 the daotai complained that the Council had filled in the creek that marked the Shanghai–Baoshan boundary and laid tram rails “in the very middle of the boundary stones”, that “one boundary stone has already been taken up”, that a Chinese constable “was mistakenly arrested owing to indistinctness of the Settlement boundary”, and that “the Council had guaranteed that the boundary stones would not be removed”. The municipal engineer, Charles Mayne, answered with a special report that is the only description of the 1899 markers in the Council’s papers. The large stones S and T on North Chekiang Road and U on North Honan Road “bear the full inscription with reference to Settlement Extension in 1899”; the Council had sunk them below the new road level and covered them with manholes. Along Boundary Road itself “the raising of the ground” for road-making “has submerged the small triangular stones 47, 48 and 49”, which now sat in manholes whose covers were to be lettered “SETTLEMENT BOUNDARY STONES”; stone 49 stood on a concrete base about ten feet deep and had had “four inches cut off the top” to fit. “All these stones are in exactly the same positions as when they were originally erected in 1899,” the engineer certified, and from then on the Cadastral Office reported each year that “all Settlement boundary stones have been carefully inspected, and repairs effected where necessary”. The police had a different complaint about the same line: along it the Chinese authorities had posted “a cordon of native police armed with modern rifles”, and the captain-superintendent asked that “some limit of space ought to be clearly defined on the outside of the Settlement boundary”. The boundary was a line of stones under manholes with armed men on both sides of it.

The roads outside

The Council had been building beyond its line since the Taiping years. Jessfield Road began as a military track from the settlement to the Fanwangdu ferry on Suzhou Creek in the early 1860s, was kept up privately by the merchant James Hogg, whose estate at Jessfield gave it its name, and was later taken over by the Council. Bubbling Well Road, Sinza Road and Carter Road were outside the line until 1899. After 1899 the building went on westward. The Council’s chairman told the ratepayers in 1923 that the Council owned about nineteen miles of roads in the western districts beyond the boundary, and in 1925 alone its engineers “formed and graded” 14.6 miles of new road outside the Settlement, with 29 wooden bridges, nearly fifteen miles of it in a western scheme that touched “over 2,000 holdings”. The gazetteer’s count for the whole period is 41 roads over some 50,000 mu between 1862 and 1925, more land than the Settlement itself.

The Council marked its roads as carefully as the Settlement’s edge, and with the same stones. In December 1908 the daotai reported a new road three li long west of Fahwa village “with Municipal boundary stones with foreign letters on them”; in 1909 the Chinese counted “over 300 red pegs” along a projected road line of twenty-seven or twenty-eight li from the Jiaxing railway round to the Nanjing railway station, and the Council replied on 4 December 1909 that its stones “may suitably be left in position to indicate the line of the future road”. In 1913 the Chinese commissioner for foreign affairs, Ivan Chen, protested that “boundary stones marked S.M.C. have been placed” in Chinese territory on Hungjao Road and the Urga Road extension, that “the Council has trespassed the boundary”, and that on 10 April “several hundred coolies” had filled the Yao Kia Pang creek “in spite of severe opposition”, moving graves and leaving “more than ten coffins” beside the road; the Council answered that its right “is clearly set down in Article VI of the Land Regulations”, that compensation had been paid and consent obtained, and that the statements “are entirely unfounded”. The stones were a system: the Cadastral Office erected 1,511 “boundary stones to define Municipal Roads” in 1922, 2,454 in 1924 and 1,539 in 1925, and reported in 1925, with some pride, that “practically none of the very large number of Municipal road boundary stones have been interfered with”.

The legal basis was Land Regulation VI, which let the Council acquire land for roads, and the Council read it generously. Its own statement of the position, in 1905, was careful: the municipal police “have never claimed or attempted to exercise any jurisdiction whatsoever” outside the Settlement, but kept “continuous Police surveillance of outside districts” there, and the residents of Siccawei, Jessfield and North Szechuen Roads paid for that surveillance themselves, 56 subscribers contributing 1,419 taels in 1905. The occasion for the statement was a Spanish consul’s refusal to recognise any municipal police jurisdiction over a Spanish subject arrested on an outside road. The consular body said the same thing more formally in July 1914: beyond the limits the Council’s constables acted only as special constables sworn before their own consuls, “in which capacity alone Municipal Police Officers act beyond Settlement limits”.

Water, rates and the special rate

Money followed the pipes. The agreement the Council made with the Shanghai Waterworks Company on 1 July 1905 bound the company to supply water outside the Settlement only to a householder who had agreed with the Council to pay municipal rates and taxes. The 1906 budget duly levied the general municipal rate on assessed rentals beyond the limits at five per cent, half the rate inside, “in conformity with the agreement with the Shanghai Waterworks Company”. The telephone company’s agreement of 1908 and the Council’s own electricity department carried the same condition: a Council road, Council water or a Council wire meant a Council rate. In 1913 “residents beyond the Settlement limits have only been required to contribute half the rate”, 6 per cent against 12, under the waterworks agreement, and the treasurer wanted the “differential treatment” abolished; about 437 foreign houses outside paid 14,235 taels and 987 Chinese houses 8,428. By 1915 the outside rate was still six per cent; by 1925 it was twelve, the same as inside, and the Council’s report called it simply the Special Rate.

The Special Rate section of the 1925 report reads like a prospectus. “The districts under the Council’s control beyond the official boundary continue to develop rapidly”: 274 new foreign houses were completed there that year with an assessed rental of 225,480 taels; the rate yielded 179,232 taels from foreign houses and 21,593 from Chinese, against 156,182 and 17,351 the year before, and the Council budgeted 231,000 for 1926 “consequent upon rapid development of the suburbs”. Its statistical summary counted 1,459 foreign and 2,524 Chinese inhabited houses outside the limits and an estimated 7,230 foreign residents, a third as many as lived inside. These were the garden suburbs of the western roads, Hungjao Road, Great Western Road, Edinburgh Road, Avenue Haig on the French side, where the Settlement’s managers built houses with lawns on land that was, in law, the county of Shanghai. By 1932 the Council counted 1,930 foreign and 3,332 Chinese houses outside its limits and took 336,534 taels in foreign special rate and 36,078 in Chinese, 276,973 of it from the western area, which “is progressing at a fast rate” while the northern area, Hongkou’s hinterland, fell away after the fighting. The police appendix of that year gave the Council’s area of jurisdiction in one line: “8.72 square miles and 48 miles of outside roads.”

The mileage tells the same story from the engineers’ side. The Council controlled about 87 miles of road in 1905, 117 in 1913, 139 in 1922, 166.5 in 1925 and 173.6 in 1928. The Western District alone went from 56.9 miles in 1922 to 77 in 1925, which is the western road scheme, and then to only 78.4 in 1928, which is the scheme checked. Each road has its file. The land for Edinburgh Road, “about 1.14 miles”, was bought in 1905 at 100 taels a mu; Yuyuen Road’s 16 mu were formed in 1913 “after considerable opposition”; the 1925 scheme laid out Fraser, Monument, Pearce, Columbia, Lincoln, Jernigan and Keswick roads across the fields with 29 timber bridges and a third crossing of the railway.

1907–1915: the argument, and the line that was not drawn

The Chinese authorities did not accept the reading. In 1907 the daotai claimed that Chinese police had the right to act on the Council’s outside roads, “all matters affecting law” reverting, he wrote, to the Chinese police bureau, and in 1908 he protested the filling of the Shanghai–Baoshan boundary creek and the road built on it. The Council’s answer was to try to move the line to where its roads were. Its police chief, K. J. McEuen, put the case bluntly in the report for 1914: the only solution was to extend the Settlement “to natural or artificial boundaries”, not “an imaginary line drawn across open country and marked by boundary stones”, and the natural boundary he wanted was the Shanghai–Nanjing railway, which would have put the North Station district and Zhabei inside.

For a moment it looked possible. The French had just turned their outside roads into territory by the agreement of 1914, and the Council noted “a change of opinion among responsible Chinese residents and officials”. In March 1915 the Chinese negotiator Yang Cheng presented a draft that would have taken in the land between the railway and Suzhou Creek, with the railway and its yards left outside, and a western tract bounded by a projected loop line, with a Chinese advisory board of five, two named by the Ningbo guild, two by the Canton guild and one by the authorities, to advise the Council “at the request of the Municipal Council”. The ratepayers carried it unanimously on 23 March 1915 and sent it to Beijing. There it stayed. The powers’ ministers had to approve it; the European war had begun; Pott’s summary is that “an impasse occurred with the outbreak of war”. Zhabei’s residents had seen the Council’s police occupy their district in 1913 and read the proposal as “a prelude to annexation”. The 1916 budget told the ratepayers that any cut in their rates “must remain only a prospect until the question of Settlement Extension is an accomplished fact”. It never was. The Settlement kept its 1899 line to the end, and the roads kept going beyond it.

Hemming in

After 1925 the direction of pressure reversed. The Chinese demands after the May Thirtieth shooting included an end to outside-road building, and the gazetteer records that it was “basically checked” from then on. The Chinese authorities planned a boundary road of their own around the Settlement and its suburbs, meant, in Pott’s words, “to prevent the construction of any further roads by the Council outside the area”; work on it began in 1928. The question of who policed the western roads, the Council’s constables as special constables or the Chinese city’s police, ran through the 1930s, and it came closer to settlement than the Council’s own reports admit. On 4 June 1932 the American consul-general telegraphed Washington that Stirling Fessenden for the Council and O. K. Yui for the mayor of Greater Shanghai had “initialed a modus vivendi this morning covering extra-Settlement roads”. Its terms, reported a week later, gave the city government a police administration for the roads under its Bureau of Public Safety, with a commissioner appointed by the mayor and a deputy “nominated by Shanghai Municipal Council” to deal with foreigners under extraterritoriality; the men would “wear distinctive badge in Chinese and English”; the Council would keep exclusive charge of roads, drainage, fire, health and the collection of its taxes; the term was three years. It was the compromise the daotai had asked for in 1907. The Japanese consul-general objected in October 1932: the deputy should be a national of “the largest foreign group” on the roads, the city should “appoint as many Japanese policemen as possible”, the rate should be “lower by at least 2 percent” than inside, and the consular and diplomatic bodies must approve first. The United States held that the matter concerned only the Council and the city; the Japanese would not move; and in November 1933 the consul-general reported that the negotiations “had broken down in October”. His Japanese colleague had offered the Council “active support, using force if necessary” against Chinese “inroads”, described Chinese policy since 1925 as “general attrition”, and warned that the roads could become “the crater of a volcano”. The Council’s own reports record the cost of the deadlock in the engineers’ terms: in 1932 the Chinese authorities would not let the roads be opened for new water mains, the Council owed the city 14,200 taels of royalty for the outside areas, and in 1934 its chairman admitted the talks on the special police “have seemed to be hopelessly deadlocked” over the force’s “composition and personnel”. It was settled, in a fashion, by the war. After the Chinese city fell in 1937 the western roads became a lawless strip between the Settlement and Japanese-held territory, and on 16 February 1940 the Council signed with the Japanese-sponsored city government a modus vivendi, whose text the American consul-general sent to Washington, establishing “a special police force in the western Shanghai (outside roads) area” whose men would wear a distinctive badge. The Council’s police handed over the western roads to that force on 15 March 1941, and on 1 May 1942, under Japanese occupation, the roads passed wholly to the city government. The Council had built them; it never governed them in law; and it lost them before it lost itself.

What became of the stones

The forty stones of 1893 and the markers of 1899 stood in fields that became streets. The Council’s own land records show how: in 1914 “Lot 376, the site of a former Settlement boundary stone, measuring Mow 0.014”, on East Yalu Road in Yangshupu, was handed over to be absorbed into a building lot. In 1925 Boundary Road itself, the northern edge, was scheduled to be widened to 150 feet between Henan Road North and Zhejiang Road North to serve the railway station. A boundary that had been a creek, then a line of stones, then a road, was by then a thoroughfare with the Settlement on one side and Zhabei on the other, and the stones were in the way.

What the sources disagree on

The Council’s reports for 1899 and 1900 are missing from the Internet Archive, so the 1899 stones are known from the engineer’s report of 1908 and Pott; Pott’s figure of 5,084 acres for the extended Settlement does not square with his 8.35 square miles, and the Council’s own statistical summary gives 5,584 acres, 8.72 square miles, which the 1932 summary raises to 5,728. The Council never printed a split of its road mileage inside and outside the line; the 48 miles of 1932 is the police department’s figure, and the gazetteer’s 41 roads and 50,000 mu rest on the gazetteer alone. Pott does not say that Bubbling Well Road was built as a military road, as some accounts do; the military road in his book is Jessfield Road. The 1932 agreement is known from American telegrams, not from the Council, whose report for the year mentions it only as an obstacle to its water mains.

What to look for

Tianmu Road East, the old Boundary Road, still runs along the south side of the former North Station, now the railway museum; the Settlement lay on its south side, Zhabei on its north. Wanhangdu Road is Jessfield Road, and Zhongshan Park at its far end is the Jessfield estate. Nanjing Road West is Bubbling Well Road, inside the line after 1899; Yan’an Road West, Huashan Road and the lanes between them are the western outside roads where the Special Rate was collected. No boundary stone of the Settlement is known to survive in place; the Hongkou line of 1893 ran roughly from the Xizang Road bridge north-east to the corner of Wujin Road and Henan Road North, through what is now the Qipu Road clothing market.